By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, November 30, 1935.
“Life,” said Jimmie Frise, “is getting safer every year, anyway.”
“I disagree,” I announced.
“Not,” said Jim, “in the mere matter of accidents on highways and in factories. What I mean, in the larger sense. Every year the chances of persecution, tyranny and oppression grow slimmer.”
“I disagree,” I declared.
“Bullies,” stated Jim, “in government, in business, in the community, in the family used to be on every hand. Tyrants who made miserable the lives of all who were dependent on them. To-day the bully is all but eliminated.”
“Bosh,” said I.
“Take the family first,” said Jim. “Until just recently, within the last twenty-five years, a young man had to run away to sea in order to escape from a tyrannical father. To-day the boy can go and get a job in a brokerage house and make more money than his old man. Not only does this freedom affect young men. It applies to young women also. In former times a young girl could not run away to sea. But to-day she can run down to the department store and get a job and go live with a girl chum in an apartment.”
“Jobs are so easy to get,” I sneered.
“I am speaking in broad principles,” admonished Jim. “The detail may be a little confused. But you must admit the modern parent dare not be a bully.”
“And how does this apply,” I inquired, “to foremen and managers and so forth?”
“A great change has come over the world in the past few years,” explained Jim, “so that public opinion to-day is intolerant of tyranny. Trades unionism in the past 40 years has practically put an end to the bully in the shop. Every business executive knows that his business will be affected if the opinion goes abroad that he is a hard or brutal taskmaster. The minute a man begins to set himself up as a boss, the whole world turns against him.”
“In Germany, for example,” I scoffed, “and Italy.”
“You little know,” said Jim, “what former bullies those two men, Hitler and Mussolini, have supplanted. Until they came along, those countries had a dictator in every village, in every town, hereditary, pompous, vicious bullies. Counts and dukes and all sorts of things, and a girl dared not be pretty in any village and no young man dared walk the earth proudly, the way God intended young men to walk, for fear of those perfumed bullies riding by in barouches1 or on horseback.”
“You’ve been reading novels by lady authors,” I accused.
“Throughout the world,” sang Jim, passionately, “there is now a vast court of public opinion to safeguard us plain citizens from the tyranny of our would-be masters. Since the dawn of time, the mass of mankind have been the victims of every bully that came along. Our entire social system was based on bullies. Bullies national and bullies local. The struggle for freedom has been nothing more or less than the slow and painful elimination of bullies.”
“You are very clever,” I pointed out, “at putting things into a nutshell. But you know what eats nuts.”
“I Could Frame You”
“Less than a hundred years ago,” claimed Jim, “you and I could be framed by anybody. Do you realize the press gang could have come along and snapped us up on the street and carried us off to war?”
“There was no press gang in the last war,” I argued, “yet we were snapped up.”
“A hundred years back,” insisted Jim, “if the local squire or the neighborhood bully took a dislike to us, for any reason, they could have planted a few dead rabbits in our back shed and then deported us to Australia as poachers?”
“I can quote you cases not a year old,” I countered, “where innocent men have been railroaded.”
“You don’t follow me it all,” cried Jim. I “What I am getting is the safety, the security of the average citizen to-day as compared with only a hundred years ago. We generally think of our improved condition in terms of street cars and highways, modern plumbing and radio and that sort of thing. The greatest thing in the history of the past hundred years is the growth of a solid public opinion that safeguards us from the greed, jealousy, malice and hate of those who set themselves up as masters.”
“I could frame you,” I declared, “in five minutes. I could set you on the spot so fast you wouldn’t know what hit you. I could have you in danger of your life, by golly…”
“Heh, heh, heh,” said Jimmie.
And we drove on. We were heading for Kingston, where, in the bays of the St. Lawrence along that still romantic shore, some late fall ducks lingered in the land of their birth before perilously launching themselves across the border toward the Gulf of Mexico, and 8,000,000 American gunners en route.
And Jim and I, as guests of a newspaperman of our autumnal acquaintance, were to urge these wildfowl on their way with a few belated bangs of a shotgun.
I felt my nose running, for it was a chilly day. I drew forth my hankie. And when I removed it, the white hankie was dabbed with gleaming scarlet.
“Hang it,” I muttered. “Another nose bleed.”
“I never knew anybody,” said Jim, “with such a flimsy grip on his blood as you.”
“And shooting, too,” I complained. “Every shot, my nose will start to bleed.”
“Put something cold down the back of your neck,” advised Jim, who was driving.
So I slid a chilly bottle opener down my neck, and continued to dab, until my handkerchief was pretty well incarnadined with my vital fluid.
“Jim,” I said, “this reminds me, we forgot to telephone Tom about the rain slicker for me. That’s important. I won’t go out without a slicker. Let’s stop at the next gas station along the way and see if they have a phone. And if they have, phone Tom to be sure to get a slicker, size forty, for me and put it in his bag. For sure. I nearly died last fall.”
“O.K.,” said Jim.
I gave my nose a tweak. And was promptly rewarded with a fresh flow of blood. I reached for a fresh hankie to catch the spurt.
“Here’s a station,” said Jim.
Ahead off the highway, a lonely but brightly painted gas emporium stood on the bleak road. No signs of life showed, but by the number of pumps and the breadth of the gravel, we surmised the proprietor would be a sufficiently enterprising man to have a telephone.
As we slowed to enter, I climbed over into the back.
“It’s started again,” I explained to Jim. “I’ve got to get a fresh hankie out of my bag.”
Jim drove in and stopped in front of the pump and got out.
“Coming in?” he asked.
“No,” said I, bending low.
I knew he would send somebody out to look at the radiator and oil. That’s the kind of car he has.
The instant I heard his feet crunch away, I hastily tied the blood-stained handkerchief around my face, snatched a handful of dust and grit off the floor of the car and smeared it, with blood, all over my forehead and ears, and rumpled my hair. Quickly shifting a dunnage bag and a valise, I crawled on to the floor, drew the bags on top of me and lay still.
In a moment I heard the gas station door open and a man with a merry whistle approached the car.
I groaned.
I moaned terribly.
I heard the man’s feet halt on the gravel.
“Help, help,” I groaned, muffled. “For mercy’s sake, help.”
I could see the man’s head as he peered white-faced in the car window.
“In heaven’s name,” I groaned, “save me, save me.”
He opened the car door.
“Hello, there,” he said weakly.
“Quick,” I gasped. “They are kidnapping me. Quick, help me up.”
I struggled and got the dunnage bag off me and raised my blood-stained face from the floor. The man instantly slammed the door. I heard Jim’s voice as he came out the gas station:
“There’ll be a telephone there?”
“Oh, sure,” replied a jolly voice. “I cut my phone off at the end of the tourist season, see? But they’ll have a phone at the corners. All winter.”
“Help, help,” I shouted.
Jim ran to the car. I heard him open the door, but I also heard other footsteps crunching rapidly on the gravel, a mutter of quick voices, and then, to my joy, I heard a loud grunt from Jim, a lot of slithering on the gravel, heavy breathing, gasps and thuds.
“Hey,” yelled Jim.
The car door opened, and the pale-faced man, with a big fat man with curly hair stared in. Then they seized me and dragged me from the car.
“Thank heavens,” I cried. “Oh, thank heavens.”
Then they bounded back on Jim who was just slowly staggering to his feet.
“Don’t let him shoot,” I screamed.
The two garage men wound themselves around Jim, heaved savagely and all three went violently to the earth.
“What the…” bellowed Jim, but gravel cut off his words.
And there they struggled and sprawled, while they went all over him for a gun.
“Tie him up,” I warned.
And the pale man whipped off his belt and strapped Jim’s arms above the elbow behind his back.
“Quick,” I cried. “There will be another carload of them along any minute. Run this car around the back.”
The pale man jumped in Jim’s car and in a second, had skidded it out of sight behind the gas station. While I, with a large woollen sock I got from my bag, gagged Jim.
“So he can’t yell at them as they pass?” I explained to the fat man who held Jim in a grizzly bear embrace. “Let’s take him inside.”
We led Jimmie inside the station, where it was cosy. Jim’s eyes glared at me, over the gray sock, with an expression of utter amazement.
“Sit down, you,” I snarled.
“What is this,” gasped the fat man, running his hand through his curly hair.
“It’s a kidnapping, that’s what it is,” I said. “This man is part of a gang of desperate American crooks. I fell foul of them in a little matter that doesn’t interest you, see? So they just took me for a ride.”
“But… but…” spluttered the fat man, “this has nothing to do with me? What if they find out I…?”
His eyes bulged with horror.
“We’ll Bump Him Off”
“Say,” he said, “the less I get mixed up in this the better? Let me go and get the police.”
The pale man had entered.
“Eddie,” said the fat man, “we’re mixed up in some damn thing or other. Gangsters.”
And his shaking hand indicated both Jim and me.
“Listen, buddy.” I said in a tough voice. “There is only one way you can handle this. Any minute, another car is coming by here. They may or may not stop. The toughest gang in America is in that car, see?”
“Oh, oh, ohh,” said the fat man looking angrily at his pale assistant who had been the means of bringing this disaster upon an innocent gas station on a lonely Ontario highway.
“Listen, buddy, just listen,” I snarled “Only one way. If you let this guy go, see, you’re finished. Even if you hand him over to the cops, you’re finished, see? There is only one way out of this mess for you?”
“Wha…wha…wha…?” asked the fat man.
I indicated Jim and drew my finger across my neck.
“We’ll take him out into the bushes back here,” I said slowly, “bump him off and bury him where nobody will ever find him. I beat it, see? Over the border. It’s the last you ever hear of it.”
“Oh, no, no, no,” wailed the fat man.
The pale man just slipped lower and lower down the wall he was leaning against, and after looking with horror at me, slowly closed his eyes.
“You can’t take it, huh?” I sneered. “Well, if you leave this guy loose, you’re as good as dead right now, both of you. You interfered in a snatch, see?”
The fat man began to shake.
“Then, here’s the next best thing,” I snarled. “Help me get this guy back into his car. Tie him up, tight, see? We’ll bury him under the baggage. Then when the other car passes, I’ll drive off and attend to the job myself down the road apiece. But if either of you ever opens your mouth about this, it’ll be just too bad. Just tooooo bad, see?”
I stood up and watched, guardedly out of the window. A car came rushing along whizzed by with three innocent citizens sitting in it.
“There they go,” I hissed, leaping back from the window.
Jim was sitting, exhausted and gagged, but his eyes burned with a baleful light at me.
“Now, boys,” I said, briskly, “let’s get this guy into the car. Stand up, you!”
And then I felt a hard bump in the middle of my back.
“Hands up,” said a sharp voice.
“Hey,” I exclaimed, but raising my arms. It was the pale man. He had a shotgun against my back.
“Let’s,” he cried in a quavering voice “let’s take them both back in the bushes, Bill. We don’t want to get mixed up with gangs, either side.”
“Well,” said the fat man, eyeing us eagerly.
“Just a couple of dirty crooks,” cried the pale one, “it won’t make any difference. And nobody will know but us two. Come on.”
“Just a minute, please,” I stated.
“Shut up,” yelped the pale man, giving me a dig in the back with the shotgun.
“Now, listen, Eddie,” said the fat man, “we’ve got to have an understanding about this. You’re pretty darn gabby. Remember that incident about Norah? How do I know I can trust you if we bump these two guys off? I admit it is the safest thing to do. But how do I know you won’t get drunk and blab?”
“I’ll do the shooting myself,” quavered Eddie. “Then I won’t dare, see? But let’s get out of this jam, and get out of it fast.”
So you see I had to tell them.
I had to explain it was all a little joke, and begged them to unmuffle Jimmie, so he could explain, too.
At first, Jimmie was inclined to borrow Eddie’s shotgun, but when he got quiet, and I was allowed to make a speech explaining about how Jimmie had said the world was safe for democracy, we all had a nice laugh together, and we bought eight gallons of gas and a quart of oil, and everything was hunky dooley.
“But,” said Jim, as we drove away, “I see your point.”
“So do I,” I admitted.
Editor’s Note:
Looking From the Engineer’s Cab Every Level Crossing is a Hair-Raising Hazard – The Engineer Cannot Slow Up His Train Every Mile or So – All He Can Do is to Watch, Watch, and Hope Those Motorists Ahead Will Have Sense Enough to Play Safe – Nervous Strain Terrible
By Gregory Clark, November 28, 1925.
Fifty-eight miles, fifty-nine, SIXTY miles an hour!
The gigantic engine leaps and sways like a racing automobile multiplied a thousandfold.
It feels as if it were hurling itself. The din is soundless, an ear-blocking din. Heat whirls in the grey steel-filled cab. Past narrow windows, the world streams dizzily past.
His gauntleted left arm resting shakenly on the huge throttle, his squinted eyes glued to the narrow ribbon of steel-shod way ahead, the engineer drives International Limited thundering through.
Sixty miles, SIXTY-ONE miles an hour!
Through narrowed eyes, he strains his sight ahead on that swift-rushing path ahead of him, swift-rushing towards him, like a river, a rapids, a furious torrent of road.
For he is coming to a level crossing that is a provincial highway. Soon he will see it. He reaches up, never moving his eyes from the path, and hauls heavily on a cord. Faintly in the din he hears his fierce whistle blow, long, long, short-short.
Then he sees far ahead the highway. Little black objects are scuttering across. Motors.
His giant Six Thousand leaps on. Oh, how the flickering dimly-seen, roadbed is swept up! The little black objects ahead seem to swell larger, larger. The engineer again reaches up, hauls the cord and the fierce whistle hoots.
Of course the highway crossing is protected. There are bells and wig-wags1 on it. It is broad daylight. It is a still afternoon, and his wild whistle can be heard miles. Yet…
The crossing is clear. The International is two swift train-lengths away from it. A low-hung touring car, grey, speeding, appears back on the highway racing for the crossing. Two hundred yards back!
The engineer crouches. The gauntleted arm clamps against the huge throttle. A wild thrill of horror seizes him, enfolds him. He snatches the whistle cord and hauls hard.
SIXTY-ONE!
He watches with half-closed eyes the point he will pass like a thunderbolt in three-two-ONE second.
The speeding motor car comes to a sudden stop twenty feet from the crossing. The man at the steering wheel is looking up with a grin and waves to the engineer. It was a little joke he was having… His passengers, women, are huddled terrified in the back seat.
The engineer, clammy from head to foot, wipes his gauntlet over his forehead and turns his eyes again on the wheeling road before him, his road. For a mile and a quarter ahead is another level crossing.
He is alone. This leaping, thrusting three-hundred-ton monster of black steel and white fire is his to make go and his to stop. Behind him, attached to him, in his care, are ten eighty-foot cars carrying three hundred and fifty men, women and little children. They are sitting unconcernedly, watching the country flying by, reading, playing, chatting as in a drawing room.
Speed Demanded by Public
The engineer is alone and all this is in his keeping. His mate, the fireman, sits across the cab, watching out the other window, his hand on the levers that control the automatic coal feed to the ravenous engine. But the two lone men in, the front of this mile-a-minute train are separated by an impenetrable, invisible wall of tumult.
You and I, in a hundred and fifty miles of motor travel, will cross perhaps four, five level crossings. We come to them as each of us sees fit, some of us cheerfully and recklessly, some of us cautiously. Four or five of them in a day’s long travel.
This engineer, traveling at tremendous speed, a speed demanded by the public as a whole, you and me included, a modern, twentieth century rate of speed, with neither the power nor the right to stop at crossings, this engineer has to cross not four or five but one hundred and forty level crossings in a hundred and forty miles of headlong, hurtling race.
One crossing to a mile is the average in the older settled portions of the province. Many of them are highways, protected by bells, automatic wig-wag signals or gates. But most of them are just open crossings with only the white cross sign. To you and me they are incidental risks of the day’s run. To the engineer in the cab of your train they are the ever-recurring, permanent, hair-raising hazards and terrors of a life of service.
Duncan Campbell of Mimico is one of the engineers who drive the International Limited, that great train run by the National Railways across Quebec and Ontario into the United States. As you know, engineers do not run a train the whole of its great run. They take it over in “divisions.” At every hundred and forty miles or thereabouts is a “division point” on the line, where a new crew come aboard, to drive the mighty creature its next hundred and forty mile run. Engineer Duncan Campbell’s share in the run of the International Limited is from Toronto to Sarnia and then, after a rest, from Sarnia to Toronto again. This division is one hundred and seventy-four miles through the most thickly-populated district of Ontario and of Canada, and his steel path is crossed by no fewer than one hundred and seventy-nine roads. More than one to every mile of his run. And in that run he hits sixty miles an hour -when he may.
“Each and every one of those crossings,” says Engineer Campbell, “is in itself a danger and a terror. Many of them are just little Country dirt roads. But in this day and age, with the motor car risen to such a place as it has in our lives, there is no road that has not its menace. Of course, an engineer, after many years back and forward on his division, every day of his life, comes to know each stick and stone of it, as a man knows his path home.
“Our orders are to keep our eye on the road all the time. Care as we must for our engines, we must keep our eye on the track ahead. We know every crossing as we come to it, we learn to sound our whistle without really seeing the whistle-post. Some crossings we learn to distrust more than others. All crossings, despite the fact that we pass them several times a week, fill us with secret fear.
“For you must understand, we run on a schedule of time and of speed. The public demand it. But I can stop my train with the emergency brakes, in about twice its length.
“If my train is ten cars, my train is about eight hundred feet long. Therefore, I can stop in 1,600 feet.
One Bad Fright Every Trip
The emergencies that arise at level crossings arise at far less than 1,600 feet; they arise at five hundred feet, four hundred feet. It is the man who suddenly decides he can make it after all, the man who has slowed up and then puts on speed to cross over, the man who is one hundred or two hundred feet from the crossing, who breaks the hearts of engineers.
“Engineers are trained to be experts in judging the interrelation of distance and speed. That is our business, our skill. As I sit at my window watching the crossing ahead and suddenly see a man start up to try and beat me to the crossing I know better than he that I am going to be at that crossing before he possibly can be.
“You would be surprised to know how many motorists strike trains in the second and even the third coach back in these attempts to beat us. If we had tried to stop, we might have just succeeded in slowing enough so that our pilot would have struck and destroyed them instead of them striking us. You have only to recall the sudden way a train appears to rush into the station platform to know how deceiving a train’s speed is. Yet coming into the station the train is actually slowing up, not speeding up.
“There is no trip that we do not have at least one fright. We do not know that the car running to the crossing really going to slow up. We do not know the intentions of the driver. We do not even know if he has seen us. It happens all in a few seconds. To us it sometimes seems an eternity. Yet we never become accustomed to it. Sometimes the cars will skip across so close in front of us that I am in doubt whether we have hit them or not. But no: they got across and waved jokingly to my mate at the other window,
“We are helpless. Once we have set the engine in motion and at a speed demanded by official schedule, we cannot stop save in emergency. If we slowed up for every crossing, not only would it make travel impossible, with a slow-up every mile, but would only make the motoring public confident instead of otherwise with regard to crossings.”
A C.P.R. engineer who cannot be quoted by name has the same experiences to tell.
“It is a regular thing in our trade for engineers to wear out under the strain and have to be laid off or transferred to lighter runs,” he said. “One bad accident puts a nerve strain on engineers throughout the country that is sometimes very hard to bear.
“A few days ago I sat at my cab window and counted eleven cars that crossed on a certain eastern Ontario highway after I was within one train length of the crossing, a matter of seconds, for I was hitting nearly fifty miles an hour. What if one of them had got rattled? What if two of them had met and locked? I could not stop in time. I pulled the whistle cord and held my breath. This was only a few days after a big smash near Toronto when half a dozen were killed.
“That night I dreamed some pretty tough dreams, I can tell you.”
What is to blame for the accidents? If the people of Canada paid out millions in taxes for gates at all crossings, as they are in England, would it help?
“The vast majority of our accidents and our scares,” says Engineer Alexander Bond, who for thirty years has driven on the Toronto-Sarnia run and now is one of the crack drivers of the International, “occur not at night but in the daytime. Our great electric headlight seems to be sufficient warning at night. In the daytime nothing but caution will do. For it is the opinion of engineers generally that seventy-five per cent. of the people hit are fully aware of the approach of the train and are struck as the result of misjudgment or carelessness or recklessness in the face of danger. Perhaps not even twenty-five per cent. were struck not knowing the train was upon them.
Foolish “Jokes” of Motorists
“I recall one day an open car coming at a fair speed towards the crossing. I had blown my whistle, but because it appeared to be a carload of girls I blew it again, for safety. Instead of slowing, the car put on speed. It was already too late for me to brake. We were hitting our top speed. All this happens, you must remember, in a flashing second or two. I was sick with the shock of it. I could scarcely look for fear. But as we rushed past my frozen gaze beheld two or three young girls laughing below me and waving, having pulled their car up suddenly, as they had intended from the start, not fifteen feet from the train.
“We get the shock, whether we hit or not.”
It is safe to say there is not an engineer of really long standing who has not hit something on a level crossing. He has excellent reason to fear them.
One engineer told of his worst accident. A car came to a stop at the crossing, the engineer watching, relieved of heart. The train bored on. Suddenly, to the horror of the engineer, he saw the car jerk into motion and start to cross after all, in low gear, apparently. Whether it was misjudgment of speed or whether the driver, flustered, had put his engine into gear; at any rate, the engineer and his mate felt the little bump which means that the 300-ton engine has struck the one-ton car. When they got stopped they found, on the pilot, a little boy of about five years dead. The father and mother were in fields to right and left.
“There was only one man who could possibly, under heaven, have averted that accident,” said the engineer, a pathetic look on his face, in remembrance of that horror. “And it was not I.”
Thundering through, the great engine cannot dodge. Either it must travel at its modern speed or railways must give up. And no matter whether the speed is sixty or twenty, the relative danger is still there.
What is the answer? In Ontario alone, in 1924, 63 persons were killed and 132 non-fatally injured in level crossing collisions. Ontario alone. The figures for the present year, to date, are 43 killed and 132 injured, in Ontario alone.2 The National Railways supplies the Safety League with statistics as to all cars that crash through gates after they have been lowered. This year the number has been 70. So gates, in a sense, are an actual menace, since a car that crashes gates stalls on the tracks, naturally.
Several of the United States have adopted the “stop law” at all level crossings. That is, motor cars and other vehicles must come to an absolute stop at level crossings at all times, whether there is a train coming or not. This necessitates the car changing gear and crossing in low or second. It permits warning signals to be seen or heard.
What inconvenience, what injustice would the stop law do the motoring public? In a hundred miles of travel a man would have to stop at level crossings an average of half a dozen times. In the course of a day a motorist does stop and change gears half a dozen times merely from the ordinary hazards and chances of the road, either a hole in the pavement, a detour obstruction, a traffic jam. Would the stop-law be so great an inconvenience?
Over a hundred dead in the past two years seem to testify in Ontario alone that the stop- law is due.
Thundering through they must thunder through, those great trains. A whole transportation system depends on the exactness of arrivals and departures.
On what depends the speed and the care of a motorist on the highway?
Just lives, human lives.
Editor’s Notes:
- Wigwags is a nickname for a type of railroad grade crossing signal once common in North America, referring to its pendulum-like motion that signaled a train’s approach. They seem to have been use from the 1920s to the late 1940s where they began to be phased out in favour of flashing lights. ↩︎
- Current information on deaths and injuries can be found on the Operation Lifesaver website, which also has good information on railway safety. ↩︎
75 cents in 1942 would be $13.75 in 2024. 15 cents would be $2.75.
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, November 25, 1933.
“Sometimes,” said Jimmie Frise, “I think you are a Communist.”
“Far from it,” I said. “I’m a Naturalist. It’s a new party, and I’m the president of it and all the members.”
“What does it stand for?” asked Jim.
“Well, we want everything divided up in such a way that nobody can get too much, and everybody can have some. But we don’t want any changes in men.”
“How do you mean no changes in men?”
“All the other reform parties,” I said, “want everything changed, but most of all they want to change men. The Communists want all mankind to destroy their private ambitions so that there is no ambition but the State’s. The Socialists want all men to be born with the idea that nothing matters but the welfare of society. The less advanced reformers offer us all kinds of good things, but also want men to be good, too. They want men to be like geometrical designs. Workers, spiritual, pious, modernized, mechanized, without any bad habits. Just doomed to a strictly sanitary, safe, sensible, eight-hour day, organized, tame, the kind of life you can see in the advertisements in a United States children’s magazine.”
“I hope you are not scoffing at modern life,” said Jimmie.
“Mercy, no!” I said. “But us Naturalists want the changes without changing men. We have the funny idea that you can’t change men anyway. Reorganize business and industry so as to put a sane limit on the wolfish-impulse of some of us, just the way you would put a collar and leash on the larger and lively dogs. But don’t muzzle all the pooches in all creation.”
“That’s a good line,” said Jim. “Why don’t you go into politics?”
“I will consult the party,” I said. “But we Naturalists don’t believe in politics. We want all men to be Grits and Tories and all kinds of radicals, and have a good time. We want them to be natural. The Naturalist party plans to give the world all the benefits the Tories, Grits and Communists offer, without demanding any change in themselves whatsoever. They can still be greedy and selfish, mean and lousy, happy and lazy, hard-working and ambitious, dull and stupid, and we’ll guarantee that no harm can come to them. We assert the right of all men to be natural. To establish that right, we are going to topple over all tyrants who prevent men from eating, because eating is the most natural thing on earth.”
Reforming the Other Fellow
“Excuse me,” said Jim, “but how will you handle the sincere reformers?”
“It is natural for some men,” I said, “to want to reform their fellow-men.”
“Correct,” said Jim.
“And it is natural for other men to want to be reformed.”
“Exactly,” said Jim.
“So we’ll let them amuse each other,” I said. “What we Naturalists deny is the right of anybody to reform us if we don’t want to be reformed.”
“How about murderers?” asked Jim. “They naturally want to murder.”
“And the rest of us naturally want to hang them, so that’s all right.”
“I see,” said Jim.
“We can get a lot of improvements,” I said, “without trying to improve men. That’s where we are all stuck to-day. All our schemes fall down because we won’t let nature alone. It’s like cows. Over a couple of centuries, we have made a lot of improvement in cows. We are getting a lot of milk from them and a lot more beef. But you start trying to tinker with the intelligence of cows and see where you get.”
Jim and I were sitting, during this brilliant conversation, on the window sill of a store over on Parliament St. This is a habit Jim and I have brought to the big city with us from the small village where we were born and raised.1 Every village has large numbers of wide window sills on its stores for the public to sit on. But in the whole of Toronto, Jimmie and I have found only two. And when we are feeling a little depressed, we always go and sit on one or the other of these store window sills. If you know of any others, we would be glad to add them to our list of good sitting places.
As we reached this point in our conversation, a well-dressed man walked rapidly past us, down Parliament St. He had a derby hat and a gray coat and gloves. He walked with a purposeful stride.
“How far would you get,” asked Jim, quietly, “with that guy with all this Naturalist stuff?”
“He’s perfectly happy,” I said. “Leave him alone.”
“What would you say he was?” asked Jim, as the tall, tidy figure swung down the street from us, full of vim, heading resolutely for some place, with purpose written all over him.
“I’d say he was a young executive in a trust company,” I suggested.
“Or an insurance man,” said Jim. “Let’s follow him and see where he goes.”
We rose off the window sill and started down Parliament St. after the stranger.
“This is interesting,” I exclaimed, as we lengthened our pace to keep him in sight. “Following a busy man and seeing what impels him on his way.”
Down Parliament to Queen we marched, and he turned along Queen, on the north side, looking neither to the right nor the left, but striding with the air of a man walking for his health’s sake, and with a definite program in his mind.
Past homely little stores, factories, warehouse, and we came to Sherbourne, which he crossed, still on the north side. A few doors along was a cigar store with a great variety of English tobacco in the window, and our man halted abruptly, and stood so long looking in the window that Jim and I had to walk back and forward the distance between two hydro poles before he suddenly turned and marched westward again on Queen, looking neither to the right nor the left.
Suddenly he veered and crossed the road. We followed. He stopped in front of a shoe repair shop in which there was only a few laces, a couple of new knives with curled blades and some spools of heavy linen for sewing shoes.
For three whole minutes he stood looking at these objects.
On again he marched, past Church St., past a great big store full of bicycles and motorcycles and wrenches and headlamps, where I would love to have dallied a moment, but right past Victoria he strode, and then crossed at Yonge to the north side and into a store he disappeared.
“What the dickens is he?” I asked.
Jim led me on and we saw him vanish down the basement stairs of the store. It was no trick to follow him down there, because he slowly wandered up one aisle and down the other, his gloved hands behind him, looking with intense interest at compartments full of screws and nails, hooks for screen doors, files, hinges. Plates, breadboards, trowels for picking up slices of pie. Paper lamp shades. Rolls of wire.
With slow, intense interest, he walked completely around the basement, looking at every single bin, and stopping to stare at many of them.
Then with resolution written all over him, he made for the stairs, and threaded his way rapidly out of that store and entered another nearby.
“This has got me beat,” I said.
But Jimmie just grinned and led me after him.
Straight through this second store, past the shirts, the sweaters, the hats, through the motor accessories and the sporting goods, out past the cameras and the perfumes, he strode, and suddenly he stopped at the soap. The soap is a whole section. Slowly, pace by pace, hands clasped behind him, he walked, head forward, carefully studying every foot of soap. He paused at some scented and warped cakes. He paused again at a pile of bars of castile like a log chimney. He went right around. the section, taking all of five minutes to examine each item.
“He’s off!” hissed Jim.
The End of the Chase
And away we galloped, in his wake, as he made his way rapidly and resolutely toward the doors.
And now he marched into still another store. Past the tobacco, past the stationery and the diaries, past the aisle circles where the pretty girls sell stockings and beads, right past the love birds, clean through the bulbs of hyacinth and tulip, down past the umbrellas and walking sticks, through the books. with never a glance to the glittering piles of literature, he advanced, and stopped in front of the elevators.
We caught up with him. We stopped for the elevator too.
It arrived. We got in. We rose to the second floor.
Out he stopped, smartly. We followed.
Past towels and tablecloths, linens and sheets he sped, and suddenly halted in the midst of the blankets. With the same head-thrust-forward air of fascination, he walked slowly amidst the blankets, looking long at the soft white ones, halting reverently before the colored and striped ones, spending so long amidst the motor rugs that a clerk came forward. But he merely shook his head.
Then, like a war horse, up came his head and he marched for the down escalator which we took behind him. Past the shirts and the underwear he made for the door. We followed him.
“Probably,” I said, “his wife was talking about getting some new blankets.”
“And soap,” said Jim.
“The chase will soon be over,” I said, “for he’ll likely duck into one of these skyscrapers.”
“And we’ll follow him,” said Jim. “I’ll bet he is an advertising man.”
“Or a broker,” I said.
“We’ll follow him right to his desk,” said Jim. “He’s got me excited.”
But on down Bay he led us, past the tall buildings one after another.
“Heading for the broker belt,” hissed Jim. He turned into a restaurant.
“Aw,” I said.
On his heels we followed.
As he came into the restaurant, there were half a dozen bright-looking young fellows gathered about the whiffle board.2
The whiffle board is a children’s game. which is played by shooting marbles up a sloping board and seeing what holes they drop into. The holes are numbered from ten to three hundred.
“Hello, boys,” cried our man gaily.
“Hello, George!” cried the gang.
The young executive took off his gloves and put them in his pocket.
He unbuttoned his overcoat. Tilted his derby back on his head.
And then, with a smile of pleasure all over his long, clever, happy face, he stepped up to the whiffleboard and joined the group around it.
Hurrying Nowhere
Jim and I went over and sat down and ordered coffee.
“So what?” said Jim.
“Hurrying nowhere,” I said.
“They look like a nice bunch of lads,” said Jim. “Let’s go up and join them and find out what that man does. I hate to quit now.”
“No,” I said. “I’d rather not know what he does now.”
“Why not?”
“Because he fits so perfectly into the Naturalist theory,” I said. “I bet you if you could follow every man for one day of his life, you would discover the most astonishing things. The tiny things he is interested in. The hours he spends in idleness, or what appears to be idleness to other eyes. The small childishness of our day, and how resolute and purposeful we are about it!”
“I can see it,” said Jim, tenderly. “Follow every man from the time he gets up until he goes to bed, and you don’t meet up much with his beliefs or politics. There isn’t much pattern to his day, although there may be a pattern to his life.”
“Just a natural man,” I said.
One of the young men at the whiffle board walked over toward us. He had left his hat hanging on the coat hook beside our table. As he reached up for it he smiled at us and called me by name, although I did not recognize him.
“Oh,” I said quietly, at this fortunate circumstance, “we were wondering about that man there with the gray coat. The one who came in just a couple of minutes ago.”
“Yes? said the young man.
“Er – what business is he in?” I asked.
“Well, as a matter of fact, he isn’t in any business,” said the young man, leaning down confidentially. “He has been out of work for over a year.”
“Oh, dear.”
“In fact, he is nearly crazy over it,” went on the young man.
“Mm-mm,” said Jim and I.
The young chap nodded and left us. “How about enlisting him in the Naturalist party?” asked Jim.
“All the time we were following him,” I said aimlessly.
“Anyway, how about letting me join your party?” said Jimmie.
“Nope,” I said sadly, “it’s a one-man party.”
Which shows you that there is a lot of thinking going on in various places, but not much action.
Editor’s Notes: This is one of their earlier stories, and it feels like they were still trying to work out the formula.
- This makes the point that this was an earlier story. Greg would not imply that he was from a small town later. This was a fabrication too. ↩︎
- Whiffle Boards were the precursors to the pinball machine. This seems to be early in their development as the linked article indicates that they were only invented 2 years previously in 1931. ↩︎
By Gregory Clark, November 26, 1932.
We have got some inside information, a scoop in fact, to the effect that the Ontario government and the Hon. Mr. Challies in particular are sick and tired of the shooting question and have decided to do with the sportsmen what they have done with the motorist.
They are going to make him pass an examination.
A shooting license, like a driving license, will have to be earned as well as bought.
The way things are now Ontario is a fairly law-abiding community for ten and a half months of the year. Then all of a sudden, in October, about forty thousand men get a touch of frost on their pumpkins, or something, and they snatch up their weapons and go skirmishing in all directions.
They have a few days after partridges and pheasants, during which chickens, ducks, pet dogs, cows, horses and hired men are shot in large numbers.
During the deer season, when high-power rifles loaded with dum-dum bullets are fired off all over the summer resort regions by some thirty thousand hunters, other hunters, horses, cows and porcupines are amongst the trophies. Roofs are punctured, boats are sunk, countless bottles are burst to splinters, tin cans scuppered and out-houses perforated.
Our information is to the effect that the government is going to put an end to all this. It is going to educate the sportsmen.
Night school classes are to be organized all over the province, unless our information is wrong, and every man who hopes to take out a shooting license next season will have to win a certificate from school before he can be issued a permit to shoot.
The schools are to be run on the well-known kindergarten system, with pictures being the secret of the method.
“This Is A Cow” will be inscribed on a large lithograph of a cow. Sheep, horses, chickens of all plain and fancy breeds will have to be memorized. A suggestion has already been offered the government that a well-known German song, sung by ‘Varsity students for half a century, might be employed. “Ist Das Nicht Ein Schnitzelbonk?” is the name of the song. The teacher, using a pointer, sings:
“Is this not a mooley cow?”
And the sportsmen’s class, all in happy unison, sing back:
“Yes, that is a mooley cow.”
Chorus:
“Oh, you lovely,
Oh, you pretty,
Oh, you darling mooley cow!”
And so on, through the quadrupeds, fowls and other creatures that Ontario city and town hunters are not yet thoroughly familiar with.
War in Niagara Peninsula
This system has a great deal of merit in it. As it is now, pheasant shooting down in the Niagara peninsula is sadly in need of rousing music and song to make it real warfare. The platoons and battalions of pheasant shooters, as they march across the fields and vineyards, could sing these college songs, rousingly, as they advance to the attack. It would give a fine martial tone to the pheasant shooting which is all it lacks now. The captains of the shooting parties could watch out for domestic and agricultural animals, and whenever one is spied they could shout out:
“Is that not a Plymouth Rock?1“
“Yaw, dot iss a Plymouth Rock.”
Altogether:
“Oh, you lovely,
Oh, you fatty,
Oh, you sweety Plymouth Rock!”
And another innocent life would be spared.
On taking the full course of sportsmen’s night school the attentive pupil will be awarded a diploma, which indicates to an anxious rural population that the graduate is entitled to affix the initial. B.S. after his name, meaning Bachelor of Sport. He knows the main broad principles in distinguishing between a tame duck and a cock pheasant and between a Holstein cow and a deer. It would not take in Lou Marsh’s wambeazle2. That is a post-graduate course. Pupils will be trained to hold their fire whenever a wambeazle or other unspecified animal leaps out in front of them.
When Canada raised its army of 500,000 men it was supposed that this being a new and pioneer country the art of shooting would come readily to Canadians. But the fact
was that just as much time had to be spent patiently dinging the simple laws of marksmanship and care of arms into Canadians as into Cockneys from Bow Bells.
It took weeks to train any company of men to handle their rifles safely. Then it took weeks more to get them to hold their rifles in such a way as to hit the target if they could aim. Then they were taught aiming.
And when everything was finished about ten in a hundred could get into the bull.
However, despite this knowledge of the facts in regard to shooting, Canadian law allows anybody who has the price to buy any kind of gun or rifle he likes and to go gunning for any kind of game he can afford, from artificially planted and reared pheasants in the most densely populated agricultural district in Canada to wallowing after moose north of the Transcontinental.
The modern pump gun in the hands of an expert will fire five shots so fast that five ducks, travelling at the rate of seventy miles an hour, will be blasted down out of the air by powerfully driven loads of scattered shot reaching out sixty to seventy yards. The modern rifle, such as the .270 Winchester, is far more powerful than any army rifle, shoots an explosive bullet so fast that in travelling two hundred yards it rises only two inches above the line of sight. Twenty-five thousand deer hunters this season tried to scatter themselves far enough apart to escape any danger from these modern whizz-bangs. And they didn’t altogether succeed.
To Bring Gunners Under Control
So far the government has touched everything to control hunting but the hunter. It has banned dogs. It limits the number and kind of game that can be shot and the days on which shooting may be done. But it hasn’t said anything about who can shoot. You are tested to be a car driver. You are bonded to be a bank clerk. Educated to be a doctor. Examined to be an engineer. To take up an aeroplane and endanger only yourself you must go through a fearful rigmarole with two governments. But to take out a stick of dynamite in the shape of a modern gun or rifle all you need is the price. It took months to make soldiers even moderate marksmen.
But an army of deer hunters, most of whom never have their rifles out of their cases except on the one or two-week hunting trip, with soft muscles, jumpy nerves, buck fever, goose flesh and wet feet, are entrusted with the responsibility of slaying Ontario’s game neatly and humanely, as licensed experts with the gun. It can’t be done.
The whole thing is very complicated and grows no less complicated with every year’s increase in the number of shooters.
The situation respecting the shooting of pheasants and partridge in the agricultural districts of the province appears to be reaching an impasse.
One solution offered eight years ago and never recognized is this: that the government. oblige all bird shooters not only to have a government license but a permit signed by the owner of the land on which they are shooting. The license itself could be large enough to have on its reverse side a form of permit, with several spaces for signatures. If shooting on wild or crown land no permission would be required. But in the Niagara peninsula, before invading any private property – and there is no public property on which to shoot there – the gunners would have to obtain the signature of the owner. It would be trouble, of course. Plenty of land-owners, when faced with the request, would refuse. To-day hundreds of farmers and fruit growers would prefer to have no shouters banging about their lands, but are afraid to interfere for fear of being considered poor sports. Hundreds of others have posted their land who would be perfectly willing to permit shooters to kill a few pheasants if those shooters came in straightforward fashion and showed themselves and asked for permission – or paid for it!
Why should not the farmer be paid for the nuisance and the damage done to his land by the shooters or to his fruit crops by the pheasants? A farmer who charges for the privilege of fishing for trout in his brook is not a poor sport. He is simply taking steps to keep the mob off his place and also to make a little rightful money. It is true the pheasants were planted by the government. But it is doubtful if the farmer, on whose land the pheasant subsists, was consulted by the government. If the farmer likes pheasants on his land, the government certainly has no privilege to admit shooters on to private land. If the farmer does not like the pheasants on his land he should be privileged to do as he likes about it.
But of all the rational means of bringing several thousand gunners under control the simplest seems to be the hundred per cent. posting of all land in the pheasant country and then the demand, by the government, not by the land-owners, that everyone who shoots on other than his own land, obtain a signed permit of the land-owner.
Twenty-five men in cars, working from telephones at strategic points, could put this law into effect in such fashion in one season that the present ruthless, reckless, rowdy and unsportsmanlike system – perfect for the local sportsmen who have the inside dope, just a panic for the outsiders – would be cured in one year.
Editor’s Notes:
- A Plymouth Rock is a type of chicken. ↩︎
- Lou Marsh was the sports editor for the Toronto Star at the time. The must of been some lore related to the “wambeazle” at the time that I’m not understanding. ↩︎
By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, November 14, 1942.
“Come on,” said Jimmie Frise, sticking his head in the door, “I’ll drive you home.”
“Thanks, Jim,” I responded, “but I think I’ll just take the street car. I have a few things to do.”
“I’ll wait,” said Jim, coming in and sitting down.
“No, no: you go on, Jim,” I urged. “I don’t know how soon I’ll be ready.”
“Heck, it’s nearly supper time,” said Jim. “I’ll wait.”
“Jim, to be perfectly frank,” I submitted. “I prefer to go home by street car. I’ve sort of got into the way of it now. I actually look forward to my nice, comfortable ride home before supper…”
“Nice,” scoffed Jimmie indignantly. “Comfortable. With people trampling all over you? Besides, it’s raining cats and dogs.”
“Please, Jim,” I interrupted him.
“At my age, a man likes to follow a routine. I have got into the way….”
Jimmie rose from the chair and looked at me a little hotly.
“For the first time in weeks,” he said, “I have brought my car down to work. Just to loosen up the grease. Just to turn the battery over. And it’s raining. And I offer you a lift…”
“It should be a treat, Jim,” I confessed, “but somehow it isn’t. I haven’t the slightest desire to ride home in a motor car any more. The very idea of it bores me. I can’t understand how, for years and years, I went to all the trouble and nuisance of motoring to work. The trouble of getting the car out of the garage, unlocking and locking the doors: the business of wheeling it out into the street and entering traffic. The dreary business of sizzling along the Lake Shore Road in a stampede of cars. The slow nerve-pulling business of struggling up through the downtown nine o’clock traffic and fighting my way into the parking station. I look back on those days with a kind of horror. There wasn’t a day of it that I did not get myself into a temper, with my blood pressure all steamed up, over some other driver. Either somebody drove too fast or somebody cut in on me. Or downtown, somebody sneaked up on the wrong side of me, at a stop-light, and tried to get the jump past me. I didn’t realize, until I started using the street car, how much of an endless quarrel driving oneself to work was.”
“Look at the rain,” said Jim, going over and staring out the window.
“Once you get used to the street car,” I pursued firmly, “nothing compares with it. It is effortless. Tired after the day’s work, you climb on board and sag down into your seat…”
“If you can get a seat,” put in Jim.
“…and you can practically snooze all the way home. You can read the newspaper. I haven’t read the newspaper for years as thoroughly as I have the past few months of street car riding. In the old days, when I drove to and from work, all I did was take a quick gander at the headlines. Now I even read the editorials.”
“Clear up your desk,” said Jim. “And let’s get going.”
The Comfortable Feeling
“Jim,” I pleaded, “you go on. I’ll be quite a few minutes yet. I have a couple of things I want to read on the way home in the street car tonight. I won’t get another opportunity. I have set these things aside all day to read on the way home.”
“Read them in my car,” said Jim. “I’ll turn on that little dome light in the car.”
“One of the things about street cars is,” I said resolutely, “that you don’t have to talk to anybody. Very rarely do you know anybody in a street car. And if you do, they usually have got a seat already, and don’t come bothering you. In a street car, you just nod at your friends and hurry past to find a seat all by your lovely lonesome. A street car ride, you might say, offers you about the only real solitude you will find all day. It is the only escape from your family or from your office. You are completely and happily alone. You can read. Or you can just sit and look out the window.”
Jim was standing looking at me very hurt.
“What you are saying is,” he accused, “that you don’t want my company home? Is that it?”
“I have your company all day at the office,” I pointed out kindly.
“So you’re tired of my company,” said Jim, walking towards the door.
“If you don’t want to understand me, Jim,” I said. “All I am trying to do is preserve to myself a little new-found liberty and freedom that I have discovered in the morning and the evening. A little solitude…”
“Good-night,” said Jim hollowly, passing out the door.
After thirty years of partnership, you can’t allow even these little misunderstandings to distress an old friend. So I leaped up and grabbed my coat and hat and caught Jim at the elevator.
“After all, it’s a filthy night,” I grinned at him. “And besides, we’re having pot roast at my house tonight. I’d forgotten that.”
Jim said nothing.
“When we have pot roast,” I added, as we went down in the elevator, “it is good to get home a little ahead of time, so you can go into the kitchen and smell it cooking. Half the virtue of a pot roast is the way it excites your appetite.”
The way the people in the elevator turned and looked down at me, especially the business girls who were probably going home to get something out of the ice box, spurred me on:
“Pot roast,” I gloated. “With carrots, white onions, several stalks of celery and especially the leaves of the celery. I think it is the leaves of the celery, in a pot roast, that give it that…”
One girl groaned. So I quit.
Outside, the rain pelted cold and hissing. We ducked along in shelter of the buildings and reached Jim’s parking lot and picked our way across the muddy expanse.
“A fine night,” cried Jim, “to stand on a street corner waiting for a car!”
“It’s astonishing,” I said, sliding into the car seat, “how skilful you become at finding shelter, when you are a street car traveller.”
Jim drove out the parking lot, peering anxiously through the flooding windshield. The downtown was jammed with cars, street cars and trucks and dark huddled swarms of home-goers blindly bending along.
“The worse the night,” observed Jimmie, “the worse the traffic. I bet you would have to wait ten or fifteen minutes for a street car on a night like this.”
“All exaggeration,” I assured him, “arising from the impatience born of the motor car age. I have timed myself, even on nights like this; and the longest wait isn’t five minutes.”
“And then you get into a steaming car,” snorted Jim, “and some girl’s umbrella trickles water down your pant leg!”
We made a turn, with motor cars honking at us savagely and street car bells clanging and muttered curses coming through the windows from the pedestrians. Jim was sitting up stiff at the wheel, tense and strained, peering through the windshield like the pilot of a bomber over Saarbrucken.
“It’s restful, once you’re aboard a street car,” I submitted.
“Do you want to get out?” demanded Jim sharply.
“Go ahead, go ahead,” I said hastily.
Tense While Driving
And down the jammed street we toiled, in slow lurches and jolts, three blocks to the Lake Shore highway, where the stampede flattened itself out into the long race home.
The traffic balked and speeded; even in this wide highway, with no cross streets to harry it, traffic still pulled at all the nerves, the car ahead suddenly slacking, the car behind screeching up on you, and cars beside racing past, with arrogant horns braying….
“I’d almost forgotten what it was like,” I mused.
“I hope I’m not boring you,” remarked Jim.
“Take it easy, don’t hurry for me, Jim,” I assured him.
And he relapsed into another silence, sitting tense and stiff at the wheel, staring through the floody windshield.
We got a little way past the ball park when I noticed the car swaying.
“You’ve got a soft tire, Jim,” I warned.
“Feels like it,” admitted Jimmie grudgingly.
The car gave another swerve on the streaming pavement. Jim steered cautiously for the curb, not without a few angry snorts from cars behind.
“Well, well, well,” was all I said.
“Sit still,” said Jim, starting to get out. In a moment he came back and said through the window that the left rear tire was flat as a pancake.
In the gathering dusk, we looked ahead and then looked behind. The nearest service station was a good half-mile. The stampede of cars raced ruthlessly past us.
“I could drive it,” speculated Jim through the car window, “but it would finish the tire. And tires, these days….”
“Don’t think of it, Jim,” I declared. “Put the spare on. I’ll give you a hand….”
“Sit still, sit still,” pleaded Jim. “It won’t take five minutes.”
But you can’t sit still in a car, on a wild and stormy night, and think of your friend out there alone. So I turned up my collar and got out and joined him. He had the jack out and was figuring how he could get it under the car without getting his knees wet, when I gave the spare a thump with my fist. “Your spare has no air in it,” I informed him.
He stood up and felt the spare.
“It’s got enough,” he muttered. But on shoving at it with the handle of the jack, it proved to be as I had said. Soft.
“I’ll thumb a lift ahead to a service station,” said Jim, “and take the spare with me. And I’ll be back in the tow truck in five minutes.”
I thought of the pot roast and was on the point of suggesting that I too might thumb a lift and get home somehow. Once I could get near a street car line, I would be all right. But down here on the Lake Shore Drive, it is a long hike to a street car line. Then I thought of how Jimmie would feel.
He soon had the spare tire unhitched. And with it for a sign and symbol of distress, he had no trouble getting a lift. A dirty old car with five smudgy and big-hearted war workers pulled up; and tire and all, Jimmie was invited in. He waved me good-by.
After at least 17 minutes, in which time I got so expert at remembering how a pot roast smells that I was practically watering at the mouth, I saw the tow truck slow down across the street and after nearly a minute and a half of trying to make the turn against traffic, it drew in behind.
“Sorry,” cried Jimmie, “but I had to try three service stations.”
And in about four minutes, the service station man had the spare on and the old tire back in his truck.
“I’ll pick it up tomorrow,” said Jim, as we drove off.
The tow truck whizzed past us, in the manner of tow trucks that belong to service stations that shut up bang at seven sharp.
We got along near the Exhibition Grounds when the engine gave a couple of funny coughs and jerked.
“What the…” said Jim grimly.
But there was no mistaking that sound. After another 50 yards, the engine barked and coughed several times and then quit.
“Out of gas,” I submitted.
“Don’t be crazy,” growled Jimmie. “I put three gallons in only last Tuesday.”
But the gauge showed empty and the dry jack handle Jimmie explored with down in the tank showed empty. And it was empty.
“Well, thank goodness,” said Jim, appearing at the car door all wet, “there’s a hill ahead only a little way and we can coast down it and turn up beside the Park, where there’s a gas station.”
Back to Street Cars
So I got out and we shoved the car about 100 yards, not without numerous helpful comments from car horns from behind, to the start of the slope down to Sunnyside. And when the car took the slope, Jim jumped in and seized the wheel and I ran and boarded her. And down the slope we coasted, not too fast, so as to let a clear place in traffic grow ahead of us so that we could get fullest advantage of the coast. This caused quite a lot of horn comment from behind us.
But we coasted almost to the Merry-Go- Round before our momentum died. And from the Merry-Go-Round to the Park is about 300 yards.
And at last we shoved her into the nearest service station.
“I certainly feel terribly,” said Jim, as we ran her stern level with the attendant waiting with the hose. “Keeping you all this time. I had only the kindest intentions…”
“Forget it, Jim,” I assured him. “This only makes a more confirmed street car passenger of me.”
“But that pot roast?” said Jim, feeling in his pockets.
“A pot roast is all the better of a little longer cooking,” I informed him.
The attendant laid the end of the nozzle in Jim’s gas tank.
Jimmie was still feeling in his pockets.
“Holy!” he suddenly exclaimed, snatching his hand out of his pocket as if he had been stung.
“What is it?” I demanded.
“I lent the ration book to the kids last week…” he said.
“Hmmm,” said the attendant, lifting the nozzle out of Jim’s tank.
We explained the situation to the man
“The law,” he said, “is the law. Besides, there is the darndest lot of chisellers.”
So we shoved the car off to one side on the service station lot.
“I’ll pick it up in the morning,” said Jimmie brokenly to the attendant, who was already looking at his watch.
And in the rain, we walked three blocks back east from the Park to Roncesvalles where we caught a street car.
And the family was just finishing the deep apple pie when I walked in.
“Oh, those street cars,” said my wife.
But the pot roast couldn’t have been better.
Editor’s Notes: Because of gasoline rationing during World War 2, Greg has been taking the streetcar to work, and Jim decides to take his car out for a day to make sure it does not seize up from being parked too long.
The illustration advertises the “Send Over Smokes” campaign that Greg wrote about earlier.
By Gregory Clark , November 15, 1919.
Of the false joys of deer hunting, several hundred Toronto men are by this time wholly aware.
As far as one can make out, deer hunters are like drink addicts or dope fiends. After each hunting trip, they swear off. Never again for them. Nevermore will they desert the comforts of a large city for two November weeks spent amid slush, sleet, and vast uncultivated areas of fallen timber and prickly underbrush.
But when the first hint of sleet is in the air, the confirmed deer hunter seizes his rifle, some old clothes and a dunnage bag, and jumps the first train north.
To-day and for the next few days, however, they are returning with the “never again” expression on their faces, tired, starved, weak and unshaven. However, they try to disguise their real feelings, they are as fed-up as troops coming out of the line after a twenty-one day tour.
Jimmy and I know, for we have just returned from our first hunting trip.
Back in September, egged on by the boasting of certain confirmed deer hunters around the office, we started to make plans. We invited half a dozen others to join our party, and all these gave a delighted acceptance. But on the eve of November fifth, the opening of the deer season, to our astonishment, they all advised us in regretful accents, of their inability to come with us. It isn’t our astonishment now.
Alone and full of high hopes, Jimmy and I set off for our summer cottage for the hunt.
Passing over as immaterial our arrival at a Georgian Bay town, our wrestling with dunnage bags, rifles, and those odd articles of baggage that always seem to get themselves carried at the last moment, our early rising in a frost-bitten hotel and our journey by gasoline launch (at twelve dollars1), over the Arctic expanses of the lower Georgian Bay, we arrived about noon, at our summer cottage. Gone were all the balmy green trees, the warm rocks, the soft blue waters. Our summer cottage was a draughty, bleak little building standing forth naked amid a few bare trees, with frost on its roof. There was ice along the beach where, four short months ago, I was wont to paddle my feet.
After a short inspection of the inside of the cottage, inhospitably packed up for the winter, we decided to shift a couple of camp stretchers into the kitchen and there to cook, eat, live and sleep.
We carried a half-ton rowboat out of the dining room to the water and rowed down to the farm of a French family, about a mile away, to arrange about going after deer. After due consideration, the French family agreed to quit work on the stone foundations of a new house and come hunting with us.
Jimmy and I had vague notions that in hunting deer, we walked through a pleasant autumn forest, with hounds stepping gracefully in front of us, ever and anon scaring up startled deer, which ran in terror from us like young cows, while we stood back and fired carefully aimed shots after them, killing them in their tracks.
What deer hunting really is comes as follows:
Three hours before dawn, the kitchen fire having been out some hours, the frigid breezes blowing through the cracks of the cottage wake us from our fitful slumber. We rise in very grumpy spirits, put on a fire, sit disconsolately around while we prepare a breakfast of canned beans, brittle bacon and tea. Then we array ourselves for action, go down to the rowboat and crack the ice in the bottom of it and row, on chilly seats, down to our guides just as dawn pales the east.
At our guides’ they remove our dashing khaki hunting coats and give us old blue coats several sizes too large.
“No good being mistook for a fawn,” we are told.
Then we commence to walk. Up hill down dale, over rocks, through swamps and impenetrable forests we go. And although it is a bitter November day, with sleet biting us, we perspire richly.
After tramping for an hour and a half, till our fine new hunting boots are scraping the flesh off our heels, we are halted on a high, open stretch of rock, where the wind howls in freedom, and the fine sleet spins and eddies past us. We are told to stand very still and watch up this stretch of rock. Jimmy is placed across a gully on a similar ridge
The hound has meanwhile been taken in a long detour away off in the distance.
We stand in a position of readiness, our rifle at the alert. The perspiration soon freezes to our skin. Our fingers grasping the metal of the rifle grows numb and senseless. Our feet feel like blocks of ice. But we Keep a stern eye up the ridge.
Quarter hours pass that seem like hours. An hour passes that seems like a day. We commence to shiver quite violently, and stamp our feet on the rocks, while our attention wavers.
Suddenly, far in the distance, we hear the baying of a hound.
Our shivering turns to a regular shaking. It is uncontrollable. Our hands seem like feet. We make a pitiful attempt to come into a position of readiness. The hounds’ barking grows, nearer and nearer.
Then, with no sound and with no movement of the bushes a greyish brown form trimmed with white appears ahead of us.
It moves like a wind-blown leaf. It does not seem to touch the ground. Nothing on earth moves so swiftly or so gracefully or so silently.
Like a streak of lightning it passes us within twenty-five feet, a great white tail waving bravely.
The howling dog appearing at the far end of the ridge wakes us from our trance. A fine big buck has passed!
We are still shivering violently and in a mental daze when our guide dashes up out of the underbrush and yells–
“Why didn’t you shoot! Why didn’t you shoot!”
“Shoot what?” you ask weakly.
“That deer! It went within a few feet of you!”
“Shoot that!” you cry indignantly. “Say, what do you think. I am? An aviator?”
Well, after four or five repetitions of this tramping through wildernesses designed for mountain goats and cringing on bleak Alaskan plateaux till our bodies feel about to fall to pieces and a warm fireside seems the furthest thing in the universe; and after four or five deer have gone past us or over us before our feeble minds could grasp their presence, we finally control our mechanism sufficiently to pull the trigger viciously just at that furious moment the great, soaring buck sails past. And by some miracle, he leaps fair in front of your bullet and crumples pitifully and tragically into a slim little brown heap on the ground.
A live deer is a big, splendid, graceful, beautiful creature. A dead deer is as pitiful a little thing as a dead rabbit.
But when you tie his four knees together and lift him up on a pole to carry him two miles to the nearest water, he is neither little nor pitiful. He weighs over two hundred pounds. He sways and swings on the pole as you walk. The first fifty yards is the dickens. The second fifty yards is an inferno. After that you lose consciousness of all human feelings and just struggle along. Where the rocks and bush were rough before, they are mountainous when carrying out your deer. Where there were open spaces to pick your way before, these all magically close up into jumbled ravines and frozen wet swamps, as if in protest against the killing of a king of the forest.
Scarce remembering our names or standing, we at last reach the river and a motorboat. In it we sit and freeze on the journey back to the summer cottage. How warmly we pictured this return with the venison! How cold the actual performance left us!
Ah, well, it may have cost us something in pride to find what deer shooting was. But we didn’t do as badly as the three American hunters, who came up to these parts to shoot moose. No silly little deer for them! Moose or nothing. And hardly had they entered the bush when they saw three large dark brown animals on the shore of a lake. With deadly aim, all three hunters fired, and killed our French settler’s three horses. To avoid aspersions on their reputations as hunters rather than to account for the damage to the Frenchman’s property, these three New Yorkers paid five hundred dollars each2.
As for Jimmie and I, we will go deer hunting never again.
But when we do, we are going to take valets along to carry fur lined garments for us; and a larger party, to help bring in the meat.
Editor’s Notes:
